In need of a restaurant recommendation for a client dinner? Improved flow in a long email? Data consolidated into an easy-to-ingest format?
For all of this and more, you might turn to AI. And, while Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini are always waiting to answer, their very existence also prompts questions. Existential ones, like “How is my industry changing? What will my job look like in the next year… five years… 10 years? What skills will continue to matter? Am I prepared for my career now, and the one I’ll have in the future?”
In an article for Forbes, journalist Samantha Walravens honed in on how AI is affecting the current education space and workplace. “Colleges are racing to integrate AI, but students are entering a workforce that is evolving even faster,” she wrote. “For today’s graduates, survival in the job market will depend less on technical credentials alone and more on pairing AI literacy with judgment, adaptability, and the human skills that machines—as of yet—cannot replicate.”
Moreover, while it may seem counterintuitive, it is our own innate intelligence and curiosity that is most complementary to AI. Anthropic’s Fourth Economic Index Report, published in January, describes research that found that the correlation between the sophistication of a person’s prompt and that of Claude’s response was “nearly perfect” at 0.92. In other words, Claude’s response met the intellectual level of the operator. Cornelia C. Walther Ph.D., who described this finding in Psychology Today, wrote, “AI mirrors human abilities, literally. In this new era, the most valuable technological skills for hybrid citizens will remain knowledge, critical thinking, and a quirky mind.”
Alas, the very existence of generative AI may be robbing us of such gifts. A recent MIT study showed that as we increase our use of AI, we are prone to cognitive offloading—or letting the AI do the thinking for us. This, in turn negatively impacts our critical thinking skills as we engage less deeply in the work and/or decision-making and trust the machine more.
Michel Gerlich, Ph.D., Head of Center for Strategic Corporate Foresight and Sustainability and Head of Executive Education and Senior Faculty at Swiss Business School, also led a research study on AI and critical thinking and garnered similar findings. He wrote, “The study highlighted that users who trust AI tools are more likely to rely on them for decision-making, thus reducing their engagement in critical thinking processes. This trust, fostered by the perceived reliability and convenience of AI tools, promotes a cognitive dependence that diminishes the need for active cognitive effort.”
So, what can we do to stop our own disengagement? First, Walther urges us to change our philosophical conception of AI. She wrote, “We must stop viewing AI as a ‘magic box’ and start viewing it as a cognitive exoskeleton. An exoskeleton only moves as well as the person inside it. If the person is stationary, the suit does nothing.”
Tactically, Wanqing Zhang, Educational Developer and Learning Experience Designer, provides three steps for actively engaging your critical thinking skills while you use AI on her Think to Learn YouTube channel.
Her guidelines for making the most of AI:
Define your context. Zhang suggests starting with an active process of defining your goals for each query or project. What are you really looking to do? How will AI assist you? What are your criteria for success? What are your constraints? What will happen if things go wrong?
Confirm the sources. Do not trust the sources provided by AI. Confirm their veracity, by going to listed sources and reviewing them. Do they say what AI is saying they do? Are they reputable?
Consider what would change your mind. What information would make you reject the AI recommendation? When might you decide that the strategy isn’t working? What new information could come to light that would make you consider alternatives? Zhang uses the example of an AI-generated marketing strategy: If engagement dips by X percent, will that spur you to pivot?
AI might be changing the world around us in so many ways. But some things don’t change, including the need to meet each decision with our full curiosity, engagement, critical thinking, and humanity. If we can do that, we can make the most of AI as a tool.